Mystery Novel Appears on New York City Street Lamps

March 1, 2011

An anonymous writer is sticking his or her novel, titled Holy Crap, to a series of street lamps in New York City’s East Village, one page at a time. Today’s edition of the New York Post surmises that the book “appears to concern a narrator who just became a parent,” with one scene taking place in a maternity ward, and prepping the reader for some sort of vague danger or tragedy. After hearing that his or her (we’re going with “her”) baby is beautiful, the narrator seems dazed: “A woman walks from the bathroom, whom I still have no memory of, in this bedroom that I have no memory of, and out to some other room that I have no memory of.” But what happens next?

At the bottom of the seventh page, which is wet, but still attached to a post at Seventh Street and First Avenue, there is an instruction to continue to St. Marks Place between First and Second Avenue for the eighth page. (The Post could not find pages one through six. Judging by the pattern, they’re probably on Sixth Street, Fifth Street, Fourth Street and so on, but it did rain a lot yesterday.)

The writer is still unnamed, for now, so the Post went around asking locals if they like the idea or not:

“Honestly, I don’t like the idea. I hate it when people just post things everywhere,” said Joe Curanhj, 42, owner of Stromboli Pizza, located right in front of the lamppost bearing Page 8. “They have the Internet, why don’t they use that?”

A cab driver notes, “Books have a lot of pages.” But not a lot of authors have articles about them in the New York Post, and that’s probably the point. We’ll keep you updated as this whodunit unfolds.